This disclosure relates generally to advertising via social networking systems, and more specifically to allocating computing resources to evaluate or select advertisements.
A social networking system, or other suitable online system, allows its users to connect to and communicate with other social networking system users. Users may create profiles on a social networking system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of social networking systems and the increasing amount of user-specific information maintained by social networking systems, a social networking system provides an ideal forum for advertisers to increase awareness about products or services by presenting advertisements to social networking system users.
Presenting advertisements to social networking system users allows an advertiser to gain public attention for products or services, or to persuade online users to take an action regarding the advertiser's products or services. Additionally, many social networking systems generate revenue by displaying advertisements to their users. Frequently, social networking systems charge advertisers for each presentation of an advertisement to a social networking system user (e.g., each “impression” of the advertisement) or interaction with an advertisement by a social networking system user. A “better” advertisement has a better chance to generate revenue than a “worse” advertisement. However, conventional methods allocate, to each advertisement being evaluated, an equal amount or level of computing resources for finding an advertisement from a plurality of advertisements of an advertiser's advertisement campaign.